Page 85 of Shattered Omega: Part Two

“Language?”

“Mostly involves brattiness and spankings and shit.”

Well ithad. Now it was something else.

“Excuse me?” Ransom froze as he grabbed orange juice from the fridge, doing a perfect ‘blinking guy’ meme.

“Hard to explain,” I said.

“Yesterday, when she was really upset. He…” Ransom trailed off, unsure how to put it to words. I knew what he was talking about. She’d been on the edge of madness, and he’d brought her back, sweeping in and giving her commands like only Dusk could.

“She didn’t…chooseus, though?” Ransom asked. “At first.” Ah yes. Ransom had apparently been a bit distressed about that. It was why he’d torn apart our living room back at the academy on the Indigo Berry Blast day.

“Not at first,” I said.

Ransom tapped his fingers on the oak table, nodding slowly, eyes narrowed. “He… chose her?”

“Mhmm,” I said, turning on the stove and grabbing the oil from the cupboard.

Andthat’swhy Dusk was still safe when no one else was. I hadn’t seen it until yesterday: the truth of the strange structure he’d built between them.

She’d been faced with the ugliness of the world in a way that could break a person. Her monsters had come for her, and she wanted to hide. I understood that. But hiding from monsters didn’t take their power away, and she needed support she didn’t know how to ask for.

For me to push into her space, though? What was between us would have to change. I would have to speak out loud theparts she was too afraid to look at. But Dusk could step behind her defences without asking because he’d always stepped behind them without asking. He could be what she needed without drawing attention to anything. He didn’t have to change at all. When the ground was crumbling from beneath her, he was absolute.

I dumped the sausages into the pan, listening to the satisfying sizzle.

Dusk was like that for me, too, now I thought about it, if on a different axis. That was value beyond what could be put into words.

Hmm.

Was that the payout?

She’d endured what he’d done, survived it, then chosen it. In return, she got something back. I thought so, anyway.

There was balance to that, I thought, as I tossed the sausages about.

Not a balance Dusk could have predicted—he played with fire when it came to the universe, but this time…

Maybe it had worked out.

I didn’t really care. Right now, all I cared about was thatsomeonewas with her.

I peered back at Ransom, who still looked unsure.

“It’s just who he is,” I supplied. “Has been ever since you saved us.”

Ransom’s expression darkened and I had to remind myself that he was years behind on healing. Everything we’d all gone through at the facility, the things we’d seen… How fresh were those memories for him?

And us, too—wewere different. I had to catch him up.

“We’d switched somewhere,” I said. Last Ransom knew, the fragments left of me from that place had made up an entirely different person. “I broke. He stepped up.”

Ransom knew me back when I hadn’t found the person Dusk let me become. I remember the night he’d taken pack lead from me. I’d fought him and lost, and woken as someone else. The first lights of dawn after an unending night.

“He was only able to do that because of what you did in that place,” Ransom said quietly. “You protected him. He deserves the chance to make it up to you.”

I snorted. “Doesn’t matter anyway. Turns out Dusk’s a control freak. Give him power and he never gives it back.”

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